Fender Bender

A friend once told me “do not try to fend off the good” apparently this has always been my problem according to her. Given that it is non-clinical, and it has encroached upon the merits that it is all based on pure alcohol-induced speculation, I guess, I should believe her prognosis.

“Everyone is a character, in a plot of this book told by a satyr or a romantic. You could either live lavishly like the Divers or die tragically valiant like El Sordo defending the Spanish hilltops.”

But I was not anywhere near any of it. I could no longer see fit to entwine myself to the life of a poet. Sure, I still believed in desserts and an occasional ticket pass to the pictures, but I seemed to have lost something between the sweet taste and the closing credits.

From a table napkin dispenser, she withdrew a couple of sheets that she used as a substitute for parchment paper. She could have written an entire volume on them had it not been for the limiting light from the blue screen monitor overhead. I can’t remember what exactly she wrote there, knowing her, she could have probably written something about the cooling waves under the moon in those sultry nights or something about a duck. She wrote happily, and lived, and coyed with the boys her age, she did it all. She was a God.

Until one day she ran away with an older boy whom she met in a smoky room. I can still remember that night quite well; they were smoking by a dying fluorescent lamp under a frameless Joan Jett poster taped on a wall. I never had the chance to talk to her about that in fact, and I reckoned that we must like we used to in the past. There was an occasion when I saw her in the middle of a crowd somewhere in Cubao, I knew it was her; she had a Mao cap on, carrying a canvas tote.

I guess for now I will just have to see her in our conversations, in her stories, or perhaps this time, among the pages of my fictions, until then.